Giuseppe wrote: ↑Thu May 26, 2022 12:00 am
Curiosity:
Simon Magus was said to be Simon of Samaria.
Simon of Cyrene works as the Good Samaritan (afterall, he appears from nothing - from the 'country':
from Jericho to Jerusalem?) as helper of a person tortured by Archons/robbers), only he is not from Samaria, he is from Cyrene.
But I remember that Robert M. Price said something about the area including Cyrene, Cypros, Samaria being the area of provenance of Simon Magus.
From
The Amazing Colossal Apostle #1
I have implied that there were partisans who revered Paul as their figurehead in his own right, with no reference at all to Jesus. To such people, hinted at in the early verses of 1 Corinthians, it was not necessarily absurd to suggest that Paul had been crucified for them, that they owed their salvation to baptism in his name. We can trace the broad outlines of such a cult in the Acts of Paul where the subject of the book is a hero in his own right. We glimpse this group of exclusively Paul-worshiping people in the Nag Hammadi Revelation of Paul, in which the name of Jesus is never once mentioned. It is Paul who is commissioned to bring Gnostic illumination to mortals.
What do we know of the pre-Christian cult of Paul? It was the Simonian cult! It is his devotees who are in view in 1 Corinthians 1:11-14 when we hear the shout, “I am of Paul!” Call him what you will, but call on his name by all means. He is Simon Magus, who claimed to be a savior, the Great Power. Justin Martyr tells us that the Magus was widely worshipped for decades. He had not converted to Christianity any more than the historical Baptist had endorsed Jesus as the one who was to come.
It means, too, that Christianity failed to co-opt and absorb Simonianism. But it tried. It will come as no surprise that the followers of Simon Magus returned the favor, trying their best to assimilate Christianity. Simonianism sought to co-opt the competing Jesus movement by claiming it was someone named Simon who was crucified, albeit only seemingly. We see this depicted, for those who have eyes to see, in Mark, Matthew, and Luke.
These Gospel writers, with no discernible narrative motivation, claimed that Simon of Cyrene was pressed into service to carry the cross in Jesus’s stead.[43] I do not mean to say that the Gospel writers would have recognized the significance of this oral tradition, but the Gnostics did. In Samaria, Simon said he had been worshipped as Jehovah (“the Father”) in Old Testament times. Now he was being manifest to the gentiles as the Holy Spirit. Bingo! There is the Pauline mission to the gentiles. But among Jews he had gone to the cross where he appeared to be crucified, that is, as Jesus. By the way, we need not suppose chicanery on Simon’s part. He may well have believed himself to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, just as the third-century Apostle Mani, as we have seen, claimed he was the latest vessel of the spirit that had embodied itself in Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus Christ.
Price, Robert M. The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul. Signature Books.
From
The Amazing Colossal Apostle #2
Marcion and the Gospel story
We always read that Marcion came armed to the theological fray with a sheaf of Pauline letters plus a single Gospel, a shorter version of canonical Luke. Church apologists said Marcion’s version was shorter than Luke because Marcion abbreviated it, removing what he deemed “false pericopes.” This is not implausible and it would just mean that Marcion used the same critical methodology his contemporaries, the Ebionites, applied to their copies of the Old Testament. Others believe Marcion possessed an original, shorter Gospel, which he tampered with only minimally, an early version of Luke.
Paul-Louis Couchoud[53] argued that Marcion’s gospel was very nearly what other scholars have called proto-Luke or ur-Lukas. G.R.S. Mead hypothesized that Marcion did not have such a Gospel narrative but rather a collection of sayings, something like the hypothetical Q source.[54] This diversity of opinion translates into the uncertainty as to whether we are dealing with Marcion’s own canon or whether we are hearing what Marcionites would later compile and ascribe to Marcion. They were not hidebound traditionalists, after all. It is my opinion that Marcion’s scripture contained only epistles, and no Gospel. His followers added proto-Luke (or ur-Lukas) later on. First, it appears to me both that Marcion is responsible for significant portions of the epistolary text and that the epistles are quite innocent of the gospel tradition of sayings and deeds by an earthly Jesus.
Therefore, Marcion not only possessed no Gospel but knew nothing of our Jesus tradition. All he would have gleaned from Simonianism was the belief that someone had seemingly undergone crucifixion among the Jews. Isn’t that close enough? Wouldn’t he at least have taken for granted a recent historical Jesus? No, I think not, and for two reasons. First, our oldest narrative gospel, that of Mark, already contains not only the episode of Simon substituting for Jesus, but it is a version that has been historicized, implying an earlier version in which Simon of Cyrene’s identity was that of Simon Magus. Second, as we have already seen, the Jesus story in the Toledoth Jeschu is a much better candidate for the Jesus story to which Simon would have appealed in that it has a magus seeking out another Helen. This is not to say that the Toledoth Jeschu was available to Simon, but elements of it may have been.
Price, Robert M.. The Amazing Colossal Apostle
Both of these excerpts are from Chapter 7: 'The secret of Simon Magus'
